It's harder, long and drags out in the end.
The big shift is harder battles at the trade of you being able to lose or not participate in battles. A lot. EXALT are heavily buffed, to the point that it wouldn't surprise me if later patches nerfed them.
The air battles are a bigger deal, the tech tree is longer, the new classes are quite variable.
New starting openings are needed, science labs matters.
All in all, well worth playing, in particular if you like it to be more brutal. Start out with "Not So long war" to try it out. It took me something like 200 hours to finish one ordinary campaign and a lot of that felt very repetitive.
Bookmarks